The Old Structures Are Breaking Down. Now What?

Living Life in the Liminal

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There are seasons when the old life starts breaking down before the new life is ready to catch you. That space has a name: liminal. Liminal means threshold: the space between what has ended and what has not yet fully begun. It is the unsettling, sacred, sometimes terrifying terrain between an old identity and a new one, an old life and a new life, an old consciousness and a new way of being.

I think many of us are living there right now.

We are living in the space between worlds. Some of us are watching careers, institutions, relationships, business models, financial assumptions, bodies, identities, and old forms of belonging shift beneath our feet. Some of us are still showing up to meetings, sending invoices, teaching classes, caregiving, creating, posting, praying, and paying bills while privately wondering what in the world is actually happening to our lives.

When the Ego Attacks What Feels Stable

I have been feeling this deeply in my own life over the last six months. It has felt like a full-on “ego attack” against the very places where my human self most wants stability: my body, my money, and my home.  In A Course in Miracles (ACIM), the ego is not merely arrogance or self-importance. It is the fear-based thought system of separation – the part of the mind that believes we are alone, vulnerable, lacking, guilty, and cut off from Love. So, when I speak of “ego attack,” I mean the way fear rises in the mind and uses the shifting conditions of our lives to convince us that we are unsafe, unsupported, or abandoned.  How does this attack show up for me? My physical and emotional health have required more care and attention. My finances have demanded greater honesty, discipline, and courage. My intimate and domestic life has been going through a profound transformation that is reshaping what I understand about love, responsibility, safety, and peace.

I am not sharing this because I believe my life is uniquely difficult. I am sharing it because I suspect many of us are experiencing some version of this. The details may differ, but the pattern is familiar: the body starts speaking, the bank account starts trembling, the home no longer feels as simple as it once did, the work begins to shift, the old structures stop holding, and suddenly we are being asked to become someone new before the new life has fully arrived.

That is what it is like living in the liminal.

It is not always glamorous. It does not always feel like a spiritual awakening while it is happening. Sometimes it feels like fatigue, confusion, debt, conflict, grief, insomnia, uncertainty, or a strange pressure in the chest that says, “Something has to change, but I do not yet know exactly how.”

These days, I have come to believe that the liminal is not only a place of loss. It is also a place of revelation.

The ego attacks the places where we believe our safety lives: the body, the bank account, the home, the relationship, the job, the title, the future, the identity, the plan. The ego says, “If this changes, you will not survive.” The ego says, “If this falls apart, you are not safe.” The ego says, “If you lose this structure, you lose yourself.”

But Lesson 151 of A Course in Miracles teaches that “All things are echoes of the Voice for God.” That line has been moving through me like medicine. Not some of the things, but ALL of the things. This lesson reminds me that what appears to be an attack can become a place where light enters. Even the places where I feel most vulnerable can become sites of correction, healing, and reinterpretation when I am willing to let Spirit, Divine Mind, or my Inner Sage show me another way of seeing.

This is not passive. This is not spiritual denial. This is not pretending the body is not tired, the money is not real, the grief is not deep, or the world is not changing. This is the daily discipline of refusing to let fear become my operating system. I get to choose how I perceive my life and, therefore, what effect these appearances will have on me. It helps that the very next ACIM lesson – Lesson 152 – reminds me that “The power of decision is my own.” Only I can decide to “accept [my] rightful place as co-creator of the universe.”

The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off

There is a book title from feminist Gloria Steinem that I have loved for years: The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off  (2019). This has certainly been my experience in life. Sometimes truth does not arrive as a soft whisper. It arrives as disruption, disappointment, anger, grief, or the sudden recognition that the old story can no longer hold.

As I sat with this under the light of the Full Moon in Sagittarius, I began thinking about Truth as a spiritual principle. In the spiritual tradition that has formed me, Truth is not the same as facts. Facts describe circumstances, evidence, events, and what has happened. Truth points to the deeper spiritual laws and Divine principles beneath those circumstances: the Love, wisdom, order, correction, and freedom that remain steady even when the facts are painful, confusing, or incomplete.

That distinction matters because once Truth moves through human interpretation, it often becomes a story, a conclusion, or a set of facts. So I have to keep asking not only, “What happened?” but also, “What is true beneath what happened?”

Sagittarius, at its highest archetypal expression, asks us to widen the frame, seek meaning, tell the truth, and remember that our personal stories are always unfolding inside a much larger spiritual curriculum. Full moons illuminate. They bring hidden things into view. And sometimes what they reveal is not comfortable, but it is clarifying.

This is part of what I mean when I say the old structures are breaking down. I do not only mean political, economic, institutional, or technological structures, although all of those are certainly changing around us. I also mean the internal structures we have used to survive: overfunctioning, denial, caretaking, perfectionism, control, self-abandonment, spiritual bypassing, and the belief that if we just keep holding everything together, eventually everything will be okay.

But I do not believe we are meant to hold together what is no longer true.

That does not mean we abandon our responsibilities. It means we become honest enough to stop confusing endurance with alignment. We begin to ask, with humility and courage: What is this breakdown revealing? What has become unsustainable? What truth have I been avoiding because I was afraid of what it would require me to change?

This is where practicing daily spiritual hygiene comes in. Or, as my beloved teacher Iyanla Vanzant might remind us, this is where we learn how to live clean from the inside out.

Spiritual Hygiene Is How I Reclaim Truth

Iyanla Vanzant is my beloved teacher and spiritual mentor. Her book The Value in the Valley (1996) shaped me deeply during the Rite of Passage healing work I did with her in summer 2023.  I find myself returning again to one of her great teachings: the valley is not just where we suffer. It is where we are invited to see, to tell the truth, to reclaim ourselves, and to make different choices that support us.  Her book Spiritual Hygiene: A Practical Path for Clean Living, Inner Authority and Divine Freedom (2025) is a spiritual manual for how to live through valley moments in our lives.

Practicing my daily spiritual hygiene is critical for me right now.

For me, spiritual hygiene is my daily rinse and return. It is my willingness to wake up and practice living truth again and again. It is choosing to engage in stillness, silence, forgiveness, meditation, prayer, sacred reading, journaling, music, movement, breathwork, and honest conversation with God/The Divine/My Higher Self every day. It is the discipline of noticing when fear has taken over my mind and gently, firmly choosing again, but doing so only when I am fully vertical and aligned with God in my mind.

There are several spiritual principles that fuel this daily practice. They are not abstract ideas to me right now. They are how I live and breathe through the difficulty of perceived liminal spaces.

• Forgiveness is the first principle. In A Course in Miracles, forgiveness is not pretending pain did not happen, and it is not making ourselves available for repeated suffering. Forgiveness is the willingness to let the mind be corrected and freed from an unhealthy perception. Forgiveness is also the conscious choice to release the hurt, the judgment, and the old story so that something new can begin. It is ongoing soul work. It is how I stop making perceived fear, resentment, or injury the final truth of my life.

• Faith is the second principle. Faith is not passive wishing or spiritual fantasy. Faith is the inner knowing that there is a deeper order moving beneath appearances, even when the outer world has not yet rearranged itself. Faith allows me to align my mind, emotions, words, choices, and actions with the good I am willing to receive and embody before there is visible proof.

• Discipline is the third principle. Discipline is not punishment. Discipline is devotion in motion. It is the repeated practice of bringing my thoughts, emotions, choices, and actions into alignment with truth. It is how I support myself when fear is loud. It is how I keep returning to God, to Love, to my right mind, and to the Divine Goddess I am.

• Willingness and choice are the principles that make the others possible. I must be willing to pause before I collapse into the old perception. I must be willing to ask: What am I believing right now? What am I projecting? What am I being invited to forgive? What truth is trying to emerge beneath this fear? And then I must choose. Not once. Not perfectly. But again and again.

This is the work. This is the rinse and return. This is spiritual hygiene. This is me affirming: the ego may be loud, but it is not Lord in my life. I can choose again.

Something Sacred Is Trying to Emerge

The old structures are breaking down. I do not say that casually. I know how frightening it can feel when the structures are your body, your money, your home, your work, your family, your relationship, your institution, your identity, or your imagined future.

But I also know this: breakdown is not the only story.

There is revelation here. There is correction here. There is liberation here. There is a Voice beneath the noise that still speaks for God, for Love, for healing, for life, for the part of us that cannot be destroyed by changing forms.

This is what the liminal asks of us. Not certainty, but coherence. Not control, but alignment. Not performance, but devotion. Not denial, but spiritual vision strong enough to look directly at fear and still choose Love.

So if you are living in the liminal too, I offer you this:

Do not let fear become your teacher. Do not let the ego make final meaning out of a temporary storm. Do not confuse uncertainty with abandonment. Do not assume that because the old form is dissolving, Love has left the room.

Pause. Breathe. Pray. Forgive. Choose again. Do the next faithful thing.

The old structures may be breaking down. But something sacred is also trying to emerge.